Microsoft officially touted via Twitter that Windows 10 would be pushed to all Windows Phone 8 devices “in the future.”

History repeats itself, but not always, at least not this time! Microsoft officially has confirmed that all Windows Phone 8 devices will be getting Windows 10 update when it launches in 2015.

The confirmation came straight from a Microsoft’s Twitter account (@Lumia) replying to a user’s question, Microsoft tweeted, “We plan to upgrade all Windows Phone 8 devices to Windows 10 in the future.”

@Kalars07 We plan to upgrade all Windows Phone 8 devices to Windows 10 in the future 🙂

Moreover, the @Lumia account also touted that they would be releasing new Windows 10 models in the future, as expected. So we may see the flagship smartphone, the Lumia 940, followed by low-end and budget Windows phones sometime in Spring 2015.

@_Y06_ There will be Windows 10 upgrades for all Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices 🙂 And we will release new Windows 10 models in the future!

The news has come as a sigh of relief for all Windows Phone users. Unlike Windows Phone 7 devices, WP 8 devices will not be outdated in the future, and the company will try to avoid serious fragmentation moving a modest user base to Windows 10.

The Redmond developers had the fragmentation problem when they left WP7 users out in the cold. They moved to Windows Phone 8 with no Windows Phone 7 upgrade path because the latter was “locked down” due to unavailability of essentials APIs and was half-baked from the very first day. Therefore, the company decided to redesign the OS from scratch and made the right choice of scrapping the WP7 project in favor of long-terms gains.

According to Windows Phone Statistics Report for October 2014 by AdDuplex, Windows Phone 8.1 (46.7%) has already surpassed v8.0 running in 36.8% of total devices. The figures will be changed over time in favor of Microsoft as the update is being rolled out to more devices while 16.6% phones are still running Windows Phone 7.x. Now, the operators could be the road blocker in the way of an upgrade to Windows 10 as they will need to approve and distribute the update, accordingly.

However, the response to a tweet is not any official press release or statement, but a sign of Microsoft’s hard work for their customers. Since the advent of WP 8.0, the company rolled out three GDR updates and one incremental update (v8.1) – filling feature gap – to stand against its rivals that had bunch of minor and major updates fixing vulnerable code and adding new features to be fresh in the market. Remarkably, Windows Phone 8.x OS have not had any major security flaws during the course of time while iOS and Android continue to struggle in terms of security.
Windows 10 for phones is expected to land in April 2015 and will likely include Internet Explorer 12 , Cortana in more regions and its maturity, side-by-side apps – similarly Samsung’s multi-window mode — for phablets, more quick access shortcuts and actionable notifications in Action Center, reportedly and other tweaks and UI enhancements.

2 COMMENTS

There is no sigh of relief for anyone who actually knows Windows Phone. WP7 is built on the Windows CE kernel while WP8 is built on the Windows NT kernel. While technically it would have been possible to upgrade from WP7 to WP8 on the same device, it would have been much more complex than the simple OTA updates people expect, like what we got from WP8 to WP8.1. That’s why Microsoft chose not to provide an upgrade path. There would undoubtedly have been a far more significant number of bricked phones if they had tried to do it so, understandably, it just wasn’t worth it. There will be no change of kernel between WP8 and Win10 so it will be a simple OTA update. Those who know the history, as any journalist covering WP should, never had any doubt that all Lumia devices at least running WP8 would be upgradeable and all non-Lumia devices will be too, as long as there’s no OEM driver issue like there was with HTC phones for WP8.1.